Are Hunters The Fittest People In The World?

So if you're watching this, Ken and I are live. People are going to be spilling in as we go. But welcome to the show.

One second while I get a couple of things hooked up here.

Cool. We are ready to rock and roll.

I'm Ben Greenfield, of course, and across from me is Kenton Claremont. Now.

Before we jump into today's show, you may be interested in the fact that we are sitting at a rebel desk, and you can get $40 off a rebel desk. It might be 50 or 60. I'm really not sure. I don't remember. But use code benbeledesk.com and you can also get a rebel desk chair as well if you use code Greenfield. So grab your rebel desk, which Kenton and I are comfortably lounging on, and I'm gonna kick my dog out of here. Then we're gonna rock and roll.

Come here, boy.

All right.

So.

Ken.

Yes, sir.

Fellow Vandal head to University of Idaho. What do you do?

Right now, for most of my time, I'm a cowboy. I'm a rancher. I basically work at a big Mommy factory. There's 700 cattle on the ranch, and we take care of them until they kick the cows out. We take care of the calves and the mamas until it's time to sell them and fix, fence, and feed cows and all that. But the exciting thing that I do is I train people online. I train hunters specifically. And then even a step up from that is the train Hunt Challenge. I run train and hunt challenge races right now. They're all over the west, everything. Washington, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado. And I just put people kind of to the test to test whether they're efficient with it with arc equipment and see how fit they are.

I want to pick your brain about the train to hunt stuff here in a little bit, but you and I have crossed paths before. I know that you ran a CrossFit facility in Spokane Valley, and even farther back than that, you were a baseball player at the same college that I played tennis for.

That's right.

Lewis Clark State College.

Yeah, we were Lewis Clark State athletes, baby.

Yeah. Yeah. So you played baseball? I played tennis. I went on to University of Idaho, and I studied sports science. And you were up there as well.

Yeah, I was. I was there studying sports psychology. So that's exactly what happened was I got out of graduate or undergraduate school and didn't make the big. Just like, you know, when you're a little kid, that's all you ever plan on doing is being a professional athlete, and that didn't pan out. So I started teaching, and I was teaching at a private school in North Idaho and then decided, you know, I really want to coach baseball again, but I have to go back to graduate school to do that because I want to coach college baseball and so to a university, Idaho. And I thought, there's nothing better to marry, you know, a kinesiology degree with than a sports psychology degree to coach athletes, especially baseball players. Yeah, they're all psychos.

Yeah. Yeah, that's what I hear. That was the one sport I played until eighth grade. And I was the pitcher. And the joke, of course, is that I was the pitcher in the pitching machine league. So I was the guy who stood by the pitching machine and put the ball into the pitching machine. And that was my big experience with baseball. A lot of professional baseball players on my mom's side, but I never really got into that sport as much as hitting a little groove to wreck it. After you graduated from University of Idaho, I know you eventually wound up at a CrossFit facility up here in Spokane Valley, because that was where I met your partner, at least at the time. But between baseball and getting involved with the CrossFit box, what were you doing?

Yeah, well, I went to graduate school and then figured out that it's not as easy as you would think to get a college coaching job, even with a graduate degree. And, you know, they're just really good jobs and they're not easy to come by. So I was just kind of hanging out, waiting to see if something would come up, working at the private school again. And really, probably the thing that happened to me the most, and it landed me in Spokane for sure, was I came down with rheumatoid arthritis and had a really big bump in the road there for about a year. And.

To go from being a college athlete. And then in my. In my mid-20s, I played some professional baseball for the Pirates organization. And then when I was 30 years old, I got diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis and did some research and really found out that they didn't really know a ton about rheumatoid arthritis, where it came from. There's some people that will speculate that it's from allergies and that kind of thing, but I knew that I needed to start moving. I knew I needed to get into the fitness industry and specifically personal training, so I could just be moving all the time and keep my joints going. So I moved to Spokane, and I was a trainer at a big box gym and then opened up CrossFit Spokane Valley with Dan Staton. And we ran that facility for about five years.

Yeah, I went there a few times. I did a few wads. My brother Zach, he worked out there. He's kind of a, kind of a beast. We were talking about him a little bit earlier. Zach, he's been@BenGreenfieldFitness.com if you go there and do a search for Zach Greenfield, he's, he's on the, in the article about how to build muscle on a high fat diet. And he used to be models. There's a bunch of modeling photos of him there.

Oh yeah, that's right.

He dragged me over that box. But were you, were you there when, when he was training?

I was, I was. I actually, in fact, I saw, I saw Zach. Most of the time he's training in the morning. I was the morning guy. So yeah, I get in there and transact. He's a great guy. He's fun to be around him and just an athletic build guy.

Yeah, just a great guy. That's funny. Zach knows that I do a lot of stuff on the Internet. He approached me last year about Internet business. He's like, I want to do stuff on the Internet because right now he's a paramedic and a firefighter. So I told him he should just start selling stuff on Amazon, what people do a lot of the time. And I know if you're listening in or watching, you might wonder about how you make money on Amazon. Basically you order stuff from a website like Alibaba or some other wholesale website and you source it and then Amazon, you store it in Amazon's warehouse is you list it on Amazon. If you list it correctly and you've got the right follow up mechanisms in place and you solicit reviews and everything, you can increase your ranking on Amazon. And so he started selling kitchen gloves, really kitchen gloves on Amazon. And netted $300,000 in the past 30 days alone. So kitchen gloves. Pretty soon I'm gonna have to come to him for a loan because actually the margins on kitchen gloves are pretty good, apparently.

Yeah.

So he's rocking it. Oh yeah.

Holy. There must be a high demand for kitchen gloves.

I guess. So it's the number one ranked kitchen glove on Amazon.

Who knew? I know, apparently, Zach.

Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, you ran this CrossFit box for a while and I think that briefly, Dan, your partner at the crossing box, he had mentioned to me about this, this train hunt program. I honestly at that time I wasn't that interested in hunting and hadn't really gotten into farming. And gardening or anything like that. So I wasn't super interested in it. But then Shad Wheeler. I interviewed Shad in a show about endurance and hunting and how hunting could be used as a passive mode of fitness. And he mentioned your name as well. And then I looked into the whole train to hunt thing, and it's crazy. I mean, it really is pretty cool what you're doing. And I want to pick your brain a little bit about it, like I mentioned. But how'd you go from running the CrossFit box into doing that?

Well, it was one of those things that Dan and I both really enjoyed hunting. And we would take the whole month of September off and we would just employ people to just do our classes so that we could hunt for the whole month of September. And it was something that we really had in common. We were both entrepreneur minded, we both loved to work out, we both love to hunt. So. And we knew there was a market out there for training the hunter specifically, because in general, most of the hunters that we have been exposed to, mostly our dads and, you know, our dad's friends and that kind of thing, they weren't big into going to the gym, lifting weights and hit the treadmill and that kind of thing, but they did want to be in shape for hunting. And so most of them would just get in shape during the season. And we thought, man, that's a huge mistake. There's a lot of guys out there that are getting hurt, having heart attacks, that are passing on opportunities because of their fitness level.

Are there really guys out there getting heart attacks?

It is probably the number one killer in hunting is heart attacks.

Really.

Now you got to. You have to consider that most of the hunting in the United States is done east of Mississippi.

Yeah.

And so most. And most of the hunting out there, and I'm not knocking away those guys hunt out there. But most of their hunting out there isn't real physical. It's mostly their physical part is setting up food plots and setting up tree stands and working the ground. And sometimes they, you know, they'll hire that out and then they'll go out and they'll shoot deer and then they're dragging it out. And one of the hardest things to.

Do, so they're not training up to the shot and they're having to drag.

It out and then they're grabbing this buck and they're dragging it out. And within 200 yards, they're. Their heart rate is through the roof.

Yeah.

And they're. And they have heart attacks. Yeah. Yeah.

It's I mean, I mean, I'm in shape. And the last, the last buck I shot was literally like, you know, 150 yards from where we're sitting right now, you know, on the forest. So I only had to drag it a football field.

Right.

I was gassed. It's. It's tough. Yeah.

Drake dragging dead weight is no joke. And I think that guys want to be in shape, but they didn't want to go to the gym. They wanted to train like Hunter. They want somebody to give them a program to follow where they put their pack on their back, go out in the backyard, grab their bow, do some exercising, kind of hide the exercise and the fitness, if you will. You know, like Ken, kind of like with what you do with kids, we're going to play tag for five minutes and they run around and they're, lo and behold, they're getting some exercise.

Yeah.

With some people who prefer outside do it yourself fitness. Let's say that you just kind of hide their programming in backpacks and shooting and in between there you make them do some exercises and they'll do them so that they get to the shooting part or get to the packing part.

You run into a situation where.

Somebody basically either lost an animal or destroyed a hunt because they weren't fit enough. You know, these guys back east who are dropping dead, heart attacks.

You know, there is. I've never been with somebody who has lost an animal, but I've been with tons of guys who have just passed on opportunities that they literally been will say, no, there's a bull down there because he's bugling. There's no way that I can get down there and then get him out of there. There's just no way. So we're gonna have to let him walk. And so it's not so much that guys will get themselves that I've experienced guys getting themselves in really life threatening.

It's just more like lost opportunities.

Lost opportunities. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting. So heart attacks is one thing that happens. What else have you seen out there when people are trying to get their own food that holds them back?

I think just when you get fatigued, you don't have as much confidence you won't go places that you normally will go.

I have a buddy who hunts back in Arkansas and he was telling me about somebody who he had set up on this tree stand and the guy went in there and he saw 15 bucks. Opening morning walk back to the cabin. They were sitting around talking about the day and Tim said, hey, you gonna go back into that stand. And the guy said, no way I'm going back to that stand. That is way too far. And Tim said, it is one mile from where they were having one mile on flat ground. So it's really just missed opportunities and guys really putting up these huge limitations that are unnecessary only because they're choosing not to be in shape.

Is part of that, like the culture of hunting?

I know this is partially stereotyping, but you've got, like, pickup trucks, chicken wings, fried food sitting around. Yeah. A lot of beer, a lot of carbohydrates, a lot of excessive body weight. So poor body to. To power weight ratio.

And I'm curious how far fitness has pervaded the hunting culture versus kind of the more pervasive or the seemingly more pervasive kind of sit around and just basically eat crap food and drive your.

Truck down the road until you see something and shoot it. That's a good question. I have been in the hunting circle, I guess, my whole life. I was raised hunting.

And in the last probably five years, you're seeing a lot more people being aware of their fitness. And I think that there's a few things that are happening. Number one, a guy, Cameron Haynes. I don't know if you've heard of Cameron Haynes, but he's really kind of brought fitness into the hunting world as a tool. Like your bow, like your camo. Fitness is a tool. And, you know, guys have been doing it for a long time. Dwight Shu has been doing it. I mean, Dwight Shu's been doing ultramarathons for a long time. And Cam was just.

What was his name? Dwight Shue.

Dwight Shue.

Yeah.

He was kind of the original.

Get in shape guy to go hunting. And he. I mean, shoot, there's pictures of Cam doing ultramarathons and shoes in the background and tying your shoes at the same station as he is. I mean, the guy's an animal.

You ever compare your fitness scores, your Fran time to those guys?

You know, they don't do Fran. They don't do Fran.

They're not CrossFitters.

No, they're not. They're not.

See, I was. And I don't want to. Want to talk crap about people too much, but I actually went to Cameron's YouTube page yesterday because I knew you were coming over tonight, and I wanted to kind of check out what some of the other people were doing. Sure. And he looked like he was throwing around a barbell, doing some deadlifts or something like that. But he's not a crossfitter.

No. Cam Is his motto is lift, run, shoot. And Cameron Haynes lift, run, shoot, Lift, run, shoot. Cameron Haynes lifts, runs and shoots every single day. Without exception. Without exception. That's what I believe Cameron to be known for, is just his.

Just doing it every day.

Sounds like just like stubborn consistency.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Stubborn consistency.

What do you do? Are you mostly still doing CrossFit?

You know, I do actually train hunt workouts, which here's the thing about CrossFit and a lot of people have asked me, this isn't training hunt, just CrossFit. Now, CrossFit has done a really good job and again, I'm not talking bad about anybody and I don't think this is going to come off bad. But CrossFit's done a really good job of actually classifying everything things CrossFit because it's constantly very functional movements performed at high intensity. Now they also say, and they have.

To make money off the CrossFit brand.

That's right. And so if you lift the weight, it's CrossFit. If you run an ultramarathon, it's CrossFit. If YOU run with a bow and shoot, that's really considered CrossFit because it's constantly varied. The idea behind CrossFit is pull three exercises out of hopper and that's what you do for 20 minutes. So everything is really CrossFit. What I do is a version of CrossFit which is trained to hunt specifically for hunting, which is a lot more weighted walks or light weighted runs mixed with a lot more like I do box mountain climbers and burpees and moving your body with weight on your back just like you're going to be doing in the mountains and then shooting your.

When you say moving your body with weight on your back, do you mean that, that you're doing your train to Hunt wads? Do you call them wads? Simmers CrossFit.

I call them workouts.

Okay, workouts. Yeah, your train to hunt workouts. Are you doing those like wearing a weighted vest or rucksack or something like that? Or you're just saying weight on your back like a barbell or dumbbells.

Most of the time it's a pack. We will do like, we'll do 200 meter interval sprints with like a 50 pound like sandbag. So do a 400 meter sprint, then do 20 ground to shoulders and then take three minutes to recover and do four to eight rounds. Most of the time I'm really trying to simulate Ben, I'm trying to simulate that same movement that you're going to get in the mountains because believe it or not, most hunters have to dust their backpacks off before hunting season. They'll be in the gym, they'll be doing bench, they'll be doing squat, they'll be doing curls, they'll even do some elliptical, even some running. But then they get hunting season comes around and they dust off their bow, they dust off their pack and now they're going. And I think that's just a mistake.

When you're, when you're using the pack, are you using like the, like the nice, like, like a Kelty internal frame pack or do you just have like a crappy rucksack that you fill with weight and throw around?

I use it. I use top of the line. I use a Kafaru pack, which is.

Yeah, that was my mistake when I was training for, for seal fit. Well, I heard about the packs that they give you down there at US CrossFit and they're literally like a 25, $30 pack you can get off Amazon.

Oh really?

No frame.

It's like a book bag.

It's basically a book bag that you fill with sandbags. So I trained for that thing all summer and if you look at my back, I've got scars going up and down my lower back because it rubs and the sand shafts and the weights bounce up and down in it and I show up to seal fit for the week long academy. That happens before you jump into the 60 hours of Kokora suffering Kokora Bab. There's a bunch of guys there with these fancy internal frame packs. We're all rucking every day. And by the end of that week, by the time I got into Kokoro, I was destroyed, my traps were destroyed. I just had no clue about choosing a proper backpack to carry with you. When you're out there doing your training hunts, you've got an internal frame good pack filled with weight.

Absolutely. And we actually do gear review videos showing people how to properly fit yourself to a pack. The importance of not saving your good pack for hunting and using your book bag for training. Because you're going to spend way more time in your training bag than you are your hunting bag. You can always just wash it because you don't want to end up with scars.

That's the problem. Your traps are all hanged all the time and yeah, you're just destroyed.

Before I ask you a little bit about what goes on at these train to hunt competitions that you put on, help me wrap my head a little bit more around what your workout Looks like start to finish. What's one of your go to workouts? As far as how you guys are warming up, what you're doing during the workout, as far as carrying on these dead weights and stuff, and then what happens after?

Okay.

By the way, one of the reasons I ask this is if you look at a CrossFit wad, 20, 40 minutes, you look at a seal fit wad, like Mark Devine stuff, that's the warmup, and you're ending out there for like three hours in the grinder. So I'm curious what, what it is that you're doing.

So I still have to cater to guys who have families and they have a limited amount of time. So during the week and most of the time, we always do some sort of a dynamic warm up, which includes, you know, you're doing everything from.

Hey, dog. Hey, boy. Go ahead.

Doing everything from giant walks to, you know.

Giant walks.

Yeah, you're doing it.

What's a giant walk?

Giant walks. When you're standing, when you're walking across, you're just taking big walks and you're kicking your hand.

Okay. Yeah.

Like Frankenstein walks. Yeah. You're going to get a good sweat, good proper warmup. You're doing the Inchworm. You're basically just getting a good, total, total warm up. And then you're going to jump right into the workout. Most of the time you're going to do two to three different movements. Most of them are going to be gymnastics. I don't have a ton of weightlifting. We will do something strength at the beginning. At three times a week, we'll do like a squat, we'll do a dead. We'll do something, a shoulder press. And then we'll go into our conditioning, which you're doing two or three movements, whether it be a box jump, a burpee, some sort of a running, a sandbag around your shoulder, any varieties of a burpee. And then at the end of each round, you'll shoot your bow from various positions, from a kneeling position, from a standing position.

So you're doing the workout and then at some point during the workout, you're actually taking out your weapon and shooting.

That's right.

While you're gassed or somewhat gassed it is.

The idea is to teach. I get that question a lot, too. Aren't you teaching guys bad habits by having them pick up their weapon and they're all wobbly and their brain's not functioning well? I argue that when you're hunting and you've been walking all day, you're going to have some fatigue. And when, when it happens, it happens quick in the woods and I mean you've hunted before, it seems to happen pretty quick. And your heart can jump. You're not clear minded. So it's a really good opportunity to teach yourself a shooting routine. You're going to do two box press and then focus. I'm going to draw, bubble anchor shoot. So I am stressing them out and then having them shoot.

You guys use the box breathing, huh? The count in hold.

Yeah, yeah.

That's so good for settling down. It is a lot of. I guess I've never had the opportunity to actually do a full box breath before taking a shot that just. But I don't hunt out of stands or blinds or anything. I'm just usually standing behind a tree. But as far as sympathetic nervous system activation goes, the ability to, to quickly settle it down is something that I think can be taught whether it's alternate nostril breathing or box breathing or just getting yourself quickly from one mindset to another. So that's interesting that you do your shooting during the actual log.

That's right.

How do you set that up? Are guys off working out by themselves out in the trees, just out where they've got a little bit of range to shoot from or are they just doing this in their backyard shooting at a hay bale or something?

All the above. Most guys are doing it just in their backyard and some guys are doing it. Some guys are doing it in their workout room and they're shooting at five feet in their house and some guys are going to a range and some guys just don't have access to anywhere to shoot. So they're doing the workout minus the shooting.

And then Saturdays is always a big long day because hunting is usually a long day.

It's usually you don't see the long days on CrossFit.

You don't see those long days. And I think it's something that is really missing from the gold standard.

And they're trying.

Stamina, slow twitch.

Stamina. Yeah, they're trying, but it's still not. It's still, in my opinion, it's still kind of the missing X factor.

Yeah. That's why I think arguably, even though I haven't run into many of your Train to Hunt devotees yet, I think that the average good Spartan athlete, for example, or obstacle racer is better than, than a crossfitter because of that endurance component.

Sure.

Like one of the guys that I hang out with, Hunter McIntyre, he can lift just as much weight. This gym that we're next to, we're working on. He can throw weight around, but the dude can also just take off and run a half marathon in the mountains. It's nothing. And I agree that's kind of the missing component is the stamina and the endurance.

It isn't. I mean they've got a lot of things going for them and I really enjoy CrossFit. When I discovered CrossFit methodology I guess is the best way to describe it, it really.

Made me.

It was something I've been looking for forever because.

Since I was a little kid I have been a 4 to 5 sport athlete. I played football and wrestled and then did track and then played baseball and when I could I played basketball. I mean I did everything because.

I was pretty darn good at everything, but never really great at one thing. When I found the CrossFit methodology or the philosophy behind it, I thought that's exactly what I believe people should strive for, is to not be too one sided. When I first discovered the whole idea of this cross training has been around for a long time, but when it was actually put into words and I read it about it doesn't matter if you can run a four minute mile, if you can't do a single pull up because it doesn't seem to be in your best interest.

But even with CrossFit right.

From a functional standpoint, they're not doing the endurance. But the other thing it sounds like you have is you gotta during the workout engage in accuracy and precision in firing a weapon. Always a bow or ever a firearm.

There has been a couple people who have done with a firearm and I tell them really your only alternative is either work out at a firing range, which has its risks, or you can dry fire your weapon and just put a dot on the wall, get behind the gun, squeeze, click and then go.

Off into your paintball gun.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, something like that. But most of the guys I have right now are bow hunters only because I think just out of necessity, most guys who do, and I'm generalizing that most guys who do a lot of the deep backcountry stuff are mostly bow hunters.

Why is that?

You know, I think it's just because the mentality of a bow hunter is.

More adventure seeking. I think that's why people bow hunt. That's why I bow hunt. I've been asked the question many times if I rifle hunt. And I said, oh yeah, I rifle hunt. I found it, well, why do you bow hunt? And I said, well it's because I'm not that hungry. Because if I'm hungry I'm not bow hunting. And that's kind of where. That's why the bow hunting population I believe is building so quickly is because we're adventure seekers. We are men and women who are seeking adventure in the things that we love in nature.

But it's still functional. You're still eating what you shoot, right?

Completely, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And you'd be hard pressed to find a bow hunter who isn't real respectful to nature and an animal. And they're super diligent about me, care in the field and that kind of thing. And for the most part, the guys that I hang out with and choose to put myself around, they're all real diligent about the animals that they take because.

There'S something special about an animal giving up their lives so that yours can go on.

What's the most challenging place that you've ever hunted where this fitness has really been put the test for you?

Well, I did a 10 day hunt in the Brooks Mountain Range in Alaska for Dall sheep. And this was a drop. Drop us off, unload all our deer and wave the plane goodbye. And they take off and we're off. I would say the single.

Is that just like on your own or did you go up there with a hunting outfit or something on your own?

My brother, myself and a friend of my brothers who's an anesthesiologist at a Fairbanks and we threw our, I think we £75, but we had in our packs our whole lives for 10 days and we took off and I think we walked for about 11 hours that day. And that was probably one of the hardest days that I've ever come across because we got dropped thinking that we were probably eight miles from where we wanted to pitch camp. And as soon as the plane took off, we dropped our map and started looking. We are 11. We're 11 miles from where we thought we were being dropped.

Yeah.

So we took off, we walked that. When was this? This was.

This was last year.

Okay.

Yeah. We walked 11 miles and then. And we're pooped. I mean we just walked 11 miles in the tundra and tundra's kind of like walking on a waterbed. Right. So it's not really easy stuff. And now we got it. We decide we're going to turn, go up, we're going to gain 3,000ft elevation. So we have to walk a mile to the river and we fill up our 6 liter bags of water and then we hike back and then hike up the mountain, 3,000ft. We got there at 11 o' clock at night. And at that time, it's.

Early, early August. It's basically light year round, or.

The whole 24 hours. So, yeah, we were there at 11:00'. Clock. Man, I'm bushed. We looked at our watch. Well, no wonder we're bushed. We've been walking for 12 hours. So that was probably the single most challenging day.

That was the first 12 hours of 10 days.

That was the first 12 hours of 10 days. We ended up shooting two Dall sheep about.

I think it was like 13 miles from the airstrip. And so I packed out my pack and then an entire sheep. 13 miles.

How much weight was that?

It was 145 pounds. 145 pounds.

How'd you pack out the sheep? Did you put that in your pack?

Yep, yep.

Did you quarter it and everything first?

Yep. Boned it out. We cooled it. We cooled it by the creek and funny story, because we.

We shot a Dall sheep on opening day and then we took care of that one and put it down by the creek so it could cool so that bacteria didn't grow on it. Then we went back up into the hills. I shot my sheep on day two, came back down and put it back in the cache. Checked the meat, had the thermometer, made sure it was below temperature so bacteria couldn't grow on it. Then we were gone for a couple days. Came back and. And the horns and a sheep were gone.

A wolverine had got in there and grabbed my horns and drugged the thing probably 600ft up the hill along with the cape. And he took one little tiny sack of meat and that was it. But when we got there, we were like, oh, my gosh, what happened? But it was a really cool trip, man. We saw. Not everybody gets to see a musk ox. We saw a musk ox. It was 300 yards from our camp. We got out. We got out of bed and started glassing. What's that, a grizzly bear? No, man, that's a musk ox.

Musk ox. Those are the ones with the big curly ones.

The big, like.

Yeah, the ones that kind of go off to the side.

A musk ox in the middle of the Brooks Mountain range. It was a pretty cool sight.

Wow, that's amazing.

Yeah. Yeah.

So these train to hunt challenges. Yeah. I've been to your website, train twohunt.com and you've got these competitions that are in a bunch of different states. So there's one in Idaho and one in Washington. There's not a lot of videos on there showing too much about what happens at those things. But what is the Train to Hunt competition? What goes down with that?

Okay, so it's kind of on purpose that I. It's kind of secret. It's a little bit. A little bit on what goes on in each competition because I want people to be training everything. I don't want them to.

That's how SEALFIT was. Actually, when I went down and did sealfit, you had no clue what you.

Were going to be doing.

You just showed up and the recommendation was, hey, do the wads, the sealfit wads, and you'll be good, you'll be ready. And that was the truth.

It was very similar. It was a secret.

It's kind of weird. Yeah. Side note, Mark Divine, he's an interesting guy, man. I watched a podcast with Barbell Shrugged and him this morning. He's a really interesting cat art club.

I was actually just down there a couple weeks ago at his unbeatable Mind Summit and the dude is just a beast. Whatever. 50 now, I think, and just killing it.

Yeah, yeah.

Just.

Just a remarkable guy. Just really interesting. All right, so at the Train the Hunt Challenge, what happens is it's a two day event and we run qualifiers. This year we have seven qualifiers and you have to qualify for the national championships. Now, keep in mind, Ben, that the first year that I decided to take on the Train to Hunt Challenge, I had no idea if anybody would do it. And the reason I even came up with it was because I launched the website and had a lot of people come in and start training and they'd peter off about.

You're putting out your workouts.

Yeah, putting on a workout. Daily. Yep, daily workouts.

People log in, they download their workout.

That's right.

And just like, just like CrossFit dogs. Yeah, basically.

And I just noticed membership is really petering out right around November. And the reason is because everybody needs something to train for.

And how long ago was this that.

You launched this site?

Coming up on five years ago. Okay. Yeah. So we ran it one full year and then.

The next year was like, you know, we're not gaining any ground here. We need to give these guys something to train for. So I came up with this idea to put guys through, you know, basically a challenge course. And it was just the challenge course. It was just, I'm going to have them run, do a few exercises, shoot. Run exercises, shoot, and then take their time and then analyze how they shoot and subtract accuracy. That's right. And subtract time from their total run time or add time to their total run time for. For overall time and then place them and see how it works out. Well, so that's how it started. And we just hung a Hoyt bow in a tree and said, if you think you can get through this course the fastest, pay 10 bucks, sign a waiver and go. Well, it's evolved now over the last three years. This will be the third year of what I'm calling kind of the traveling race season. And last year was the first year that we did a national champion. Because the first year I tried to set up each course so similar that I figured if I could just take whoever had the fastest time through the course, I could just crown them the national champion. Well, it's really tough when you're talking about setting up a course in Arizona and Colorado. You couldn't get a whole lot different.

Topography.

So say I probably run into Spartan race. They've got some courses that are good for the, what they call it, the skinny mini runners and some courses that are catered to the big string of power athletes.

That's right. And it's tough to compare those two.

This race winner versus this, who really.

Truly is the best. That's right.

That's right.

The best fittest hunter.

That's right. So last year I said, let's bring them together. I'll take the top five placers in each division, we'll put them together, and we'll just put them head to head in Colorado and we'll see who ends up winning. So this year we're doing the same thing. We're going to do these seven qualifiers. And on day one, first thing you're going to do is you're going to do what I call a hunter's 3D course, and partially the Train to Hunt Challenge course was born because of the standard 3D shoot is just too boring. If you've ever been to a 3D shoot, which you probably haven't, but here's the standard 3D shoot. You basically get in line at target one, wait for the group of, you know, two to six people that are shooting in front of you to get done and then out of the way. And then you shoot the next target and then it gets backed up. It'll take you four hours to shoot 20 targets.

And there's targets are progressively farther away.

They're 20 to 60 yards. And most of the time, sometimes you have to use rangefinder and so you know how far it is. Sometimes they don't let you use rangefinders. And that's usually what that whole idea, what that is testing is your consistency, your accuracy, and your ability to judge yardage. Well, I put a spin on it and said that doesn't feel like true hunting. True hunting is when you draw your bow and that animal faces you and now you don't have a shot. So you have to hold it and hold it and hold it and hold it and hold it. So what I do is I set this.

Is it hard?

It is. If you hold your bow for 60 seconds, you start getting some.

How many pounds are you holding on like a typical compound?

60 to 70 is a typical compound. Some people will shoot to be legal, you only have to shoot like 40 to 45 pounds. But most guys, and even most women are shooting above 50. Most guys are shooting 60 to 70.

Could you parallel that for army listeners who haven't shot a bow to like leaning over, doing a dumbbell row with a 50 or 60 or 70 pound weight and holding that with your elbow back?

That's right. If you got down in like a plank position, put your arm straight out, grab the dumbbell, and you held, say a 30 or 40 pound dumbbell right here for one minute. Oh, right.

Because you're counting for the weight that you're pushing out against the dial. Kind of like a renegade row.

Yeah. For one minute and then put it down and then try to be accurate after that step.

Exercise is a good exercise.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'll have them draw, kneeling and then stand. And they can't even see this target when they're kneeling. So they draw stand up. Now I can see the target. And they can shoot at will whenever they feel comfortable shooting. Have draw and move up from behind the tree and shoot. Just more realistic kind of situations where you're not just standing there all comfortable. Get your range finder. The animal's just not going to stand there. You're kind of in a hidden position and most of the time you're either kneeling or you're behind something. So I set up this 3D course and we just score it regularly. There's a 10 ring and 8 ring, and anything that is outside the 8 ring scores the rings being the target. That's right. That's right. And so that's one event, and I'd like to do that one first because it gives the competitors a chance to pair up and get to know each other a little bit and just kind of buddy up. Then the second event happens in the afternoon, which is the meat Pack, which is, I think, probably the most intimidating one.

I get the most questions about it anyway, because last year it was a little heavy. Last year I had them packing 200 pounds from point A to point B and they could do it however they wanted. They could take 20 trips of 10. They could just pick up.

You aren't carrying all £200 at once necessarily.

They did not have to.

Packs. Is this like weights? Is this actual meat that you have them carrying?

This is sandbags. Okay.

I was gonna say it could get expensive to have multiple 200 pound piles of. Piles of meat. Sand.

Yeah, it's sandbags. Sandbags. And it's broke up. Like the 200 pounds was broken. The 250s and 425s. You can break it up however you want. It was really to simulate, all right, I'm away from my house, my truck, whatever. I've shot something, I've scanned it, I've quartered it. Now I need to get that meat from that point to my truck or to my house.

And how far are they?

Last year it was about anywhere between 600 yards and 800 yards. It wasn't that far. It wasn't really that far. There were some. Now, Oregon, it's pretty anaerobic. It is.

You're pushing that.

It is.

I don't know if you heard much about Spartan World Championships this year, but we came up at one obstacle, and some guys took literally like 60, 70 minutes to get through this one obstacle. It was basically two 60, 70 pound sandbags straight up the side of a mountain about a half mile straight back. You could do it however you want. Right. Like most guys, because it's very difficult to carry 140, £40 on your back. And actually the guy that wound up, he didn't win. He came in second. He was one of the few guys who was able to just grab both sandbags just because he's got deadlifting strength. And he just. Oh, he just dragged him up the side of the mountain and back down. I leapfrogged him. I cleaned both sandbags up and I put them on my shoulder And I took 10 steps. And I was like, there is no freaking way. So I just dropped one and would carry one up 20ft, come back and grab the other. It sounds kind of similar physiologically to that.

Very similar.

So these guys can carry however they want. They can hold on their chest, they can put it on their back.

Last year, they did the qualifiers. They could do it however they wanted. They could carry it. They could put it as Much in their pack. And a lot of guys, what they did was they put £150 in their pack and then they just carry 25s in each hand and just go for it. Because it is also.

They have a pack they could put it in.

Yeah, absolutely. And to simulate the pack out, it's trying to get as close as we can to real hunting situations. Yeah. So this year, and this is for all you train and hunt people out there, this is inside. Inside stuff. This year I'm gonna make it a lot more aerobic. It's gonna be aerobic. Yeah. It's gonna be a lot further and it's gonna be a lot lighter.

Yeah.

So I won't give away the exact weights, but it's not going to be as frantic. You're not going to be as taxed.

Going a little bit more ancestral.

Exactly. We need that component. We need the component because.

Ideally I'd have a whole day where we start at 3 in the morning and we go 15 miles because that's really a good hard hunting day. But with time restraints, we're just going to have to go.

You do the same kind of approach as 3D shoot in this pack every single course that you're running in America. And then the winners of each event come together and compete at one final championship.

Yeah. The top three from each division will come together for a championship on Sunday. Now, on Sunday, it's kind of the grand finale. The shooting portion of the train hunt challenge is worth 25% of your total score. And the meat pack is worth 25% of your total score. Because you can be a really good archer and not necessarily have the other components. You could win. You could be a great archer, but you can't.

You could just basically be a fat guy or shoes.

Good.

Exactly.

Exactly. Or you could be a beast of a man and like just a pack mule that everybody calls when he kill stuff. Because you can get him out of the mountains, but you can't shoot with a hill of beans. So it's worth 25% of your score. On Sunday, we run what's called the train hunt challenge course. And this is a run exercise shoot. You have penalties for shooting, for missing a target. If you miss a target, it's 25 burpees with your pack on.

Oh, burpees.

Yeah. With your pack on. Yeah.

Who's reffing the burpees? They run into this problem in Spartans. With some guys, burpees are different than.

Oh, really? Yeah.

I mean, some guys will go chest to ground, feet out Stand up, jump arms above the head. Some guys will read the rules that say, technically, a burpee is your chest going lower than your feet and then your head going higher than your feet. So they'll just touch their chest to the ground, almost do this wormy action on the ground burpee.

I helped eliminate a lot of that gray area because I didn't want my judges to be put in a situation where they had to basically stop somebody and say, you have to do them all over because we're doing the work. I know what I did was I put. I put lines on the ground, and you got to do a burpee over here, and then you got to get over here and do your next one. So I don't care. I don't care.

You have to be vertical.

Yeah.

Between each burp.

I mean, you can. You can hunch over and go over instead of standing on the. All the way up.

Joe Desana, Robert Coble. You guys, I hope you're watching this, Listening. That's how you need to start doing things.

That's how you do it.

Ken's figure it out.

Yeah, that's right.

Two vertical lines.

Two vertical lines. Do burpee over here, burpee over here, burpee over here. And that way, if you're touching your chest on the ground over here.

You have to get up and waddle over here.

Yeah. Of course, what they're doing, as far as I was, They've got a GoPro at each of the. The burpee station, the penalty stations, and if you're on the podium or you're in the cash or you're in any position, they'll review to make sure that you did. In this case, it's 30. So they'll check your camera footage to make sure that you really. So they have a good, like, four to five hours between the end of the race and the award ceremony for you to be able to dispute or for them to be able to review footage from the top finishers. So then they just started doing that with cameras.

They have to do that with a spart race because you guys are. I don't know how many guys are running at a time, but.

And there's a lot. It sounds like you don't have a ton of burpee stations or.

We have six.

Six. Okay.

There's six possible burpee stations. Some people only end up doing, you know, 25 burpees at the burpee station. So, for instance, man will go run, and then we'll go £50 sandbag, ground to shoulder. Bad guys touch the ground, the bad guys get on your shoulder and you have to stand up. Now, there's been some in the past, some judges saying, I'm having a tough time having some people stand all the way up. So this year what I may do is have them touch the ground and they got to throw the sandbag over their shoulder and then turn around and touch the ground, throw it over their shoulder. Just to alleviate some of that gray area. I want real black and white. You did it.

You did it.

That's it.

And then they'll shoot and then they'll go on to the next station and they'll pick up £70 carrying a bow.

With them in between stations.

Carrying their bow. Yeah, always having your bow. The bow always has arrows in the quiver or your arrows are in your backpack so you don't fall on an arrow in your run. You get to the next station, you do the exercise there, which is, they say it's 400 meter run up the hill with a 70 pound pack and your bow. So you go up and around, around the cone. Judges just make sure they see you go around the cone, come back down, shoot if you hit the target.

You're not doing chip timing yet.

No, we're not, not yet. But it's around the corner. It is. It's something that as we get bigger. It's just an obstacle that I continue to have to get over is how to deal with more people.

More people.

How can I, how can I be more inclusive?

Yeah, that's the trick is scalability. I mean, have you done an obstacle race before? Like a tough mudder?

You'd probably be pretty good at them if you put together these train hunt competitions. And they've run into a lot of scalability issues as far as like you have your elite waves that go and you can go fast and the obstacles aren't gummed up. But I've gone back after running in the elite wave and helped others through other waves. And I mean, sometimes you're standing there for like five minutes just waiting to get on an obstacle to complete. That's not a race anymore. It's just kind of.

No, that's right.

So who wins these things?

The right guys. They do. I did a really. I did a lot of thinking about how to avoid allowing the professional shooter to win and the cross country runner who takes their recurve and just kind of flings arrows as they run by from winning. And that's where the 25 burpee penalty comes in. And that's where the meat pack comes in. The guys who win these are legit shooting fit guys.

Do you compete or you just ref them? I don't.

I usually run the courses once I set them up to see if there's any snags, if there's any places on the trail where somebody could get lost or anything like that. But unfortunately I don't get to do my own.

These guys are pretty fit, huh?

These guys are pretty fit, man. There's some guys out there, God bless them, man. They just get out there and it's not really about competing against others. It's about being able to say, I did this, I got out there and did it. And you probably see a lot of it in the Spartan race, but.

You wouldn't guess the guys are competing when it's all said and done because there's a lot of camaraderie and kind of we're all in this together. A lot of Pat's on the back and like I was telling somebody prior to the national championship was that because it was the first time they'd ever seen a CrossFit or a train to Hunt competition. And I said, this is going to be the only place you'll ever see somebody go up, hand somebody a water, help them out with their backpack, take their bow, make sure they're okay. And they have no idea. They've never talked to this person forever and they're a competitor. Yeah, it's a real. There's a lot of friendships built in these competitions and a lot of. I think that what happens, Ben, is that kind of the high, go high, motivated, elite, kind of out of the box fitness guys. I think a lot of times we feel like we live on an island because our whole lives we've had a tough time finding training partners, finding hunting partners and finding people who kind of tick the same way we tick. And what I'm finding is that these competitions are attracting a lot of these guys who felt like they lived on an island for a long time. And they all come together and they find out they're like minded, they live close to each other. There's guys right now, there's 15 guys right now in Colorado that get together at least twice a week and they work out specifically for the Train Hunt challenge because they met at the Train Challenge last year and they're going to do better this year.

How many people are doing this? Do you have any idea?

Yeah, last year I think we ran 460 total people through, so it's pretty small scale. Still And I really am trying is.

That how many people are doing the competitions? Do you have more people than that actually going to your website and doing the workouts?

Right now there's somewhere between four and five hundred people doing the workouts every day. And the competitions are drawing between 4 and 500 people. And then the spectators are coming in again. This will only be the third year of the traveling competition and I don't advertise. I do some flyers. I get some guys, some boots on the ground at each spot and have them spread the word. But inevitably it always comes about that. I'll go to a site and start setting up and somebody will say, what do you got going here? Oh, it's the training hunt challenge. I never heard about it. And he's local and he's an archer.

Where do you do these? On private land, like ranches and stuff like that?

No, what I do is I recruit boat clubs from different towns. Like in Eugene, the cascading bowman. I give them a call and say, hey, do you guys have anything going on this weekend? And they say, I don't. I said, well, this is who I am. This is what I want to do.

This is what I'll like, use their 3D range.

Yeah, I use their targets in the range and I give them a percentage of the entry fee and it works pretty well because everything's already set up. I have targets there. I would like to get on a little bit bigger scale and possibly be able to run more people at a time.

So I can. Right now I'm kind of walled up at about 130 people per event just because of the logistics. You can't have somebody waiting. You can't. But you're a little bit limited to how many shooting stations. You can get on one target and have very similar shoot shots. Because it's first come first serve. The first person there, they can go station number one and then you just file in, you all take a shot and then you move on and it's first come, first serve. But again, I don't want the last guy there to have a huge disadvantage and can't even see the target.

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, if you look at Ironman Triathlon, right, they ran into a similar issue and they went a different way than Spartan. Like Spartan has simply added more waves, right. Like you just go farther into the night.

Right.

Ironman has added more races, right. Like more locations. So there's like tons. You know, There were like 12 initially, now there's like 40 plus races around the globe. Because they top them off at 1500 people and they just add another race and another race. It's a good model for them. Sounds like you just have to hook up with a lot of archery clubs. Yeah.

And it's not hard to do. It's not. I can tell you that right now.

Are you having to go to each of these races or do you have people like certified coaches, things like that?

No, I am. If it's happening, if it's a training hunt event, it's me. If it's a workout, if it's an event, if it's an email, if it's a phone call, I wear all hats right now. But I do have some guys lined up that are. I mean, this is a training year. I got six guys right now that are lined up that just really want to be part of it and see the future and want to be. So I'm calling future directors. And so I'm going to train them on how to. How to facilitate an event, start to finish. And then next year I'll turn over the events to these six guys and then I'll expand. I'm going to go to Texas, Pennsylvania, California, and I'm gonna try and get another one out there in the east coast, somewhere like Arkansas, Alabama, someplace like that. But then I get. I'll get two or three phone calls a week about how can I get a train challenge in my state.

Yeah.

Wow. And I just. I just. There's not enough for me to go around.

Yeah, that's a smart move, though. Get more boots on the ground.

That's right. Yeah, that's right. And. And I did contemplate, you know what, let's just go huge. I'll figure it out when we get there. And then I decided, you know, really what I need to focus on is making a really great event. And if you have a great event, people travel, people will come to you. If you have a great event, people will travel miles and miles to come to you.

Yeah. So of course, the other thing, Ironman, is they started charging like a thousand bucks to race. So there's that.

Yeah, they have a few more logistics. Exactly.

But they're also not shooting arrows.

They're not.

Do you guys do water? Do you have any water crossings?

Not yet. Not yet. This thing is going to take on a life of its own. And the limitations.

The lids aren't the jar. No, it will.

I mean, I guarantee that as people become more aware. I was actually talking to Tawny Prasak from Endurance Planet this morning about this. We Were doing a podcast. She was asking me about fitness or nutrition trends for 2015. People are going to become more aware of the functional and the psychological and the physical benefits of gathering your own food. Whether gathering your own food is spending time in the backyard garden, pushing a wheelbarrow around, or trekking up mountainside to eat an animal. And I think that that form of functional fitness, rather than just exercising for exercise's sake, for exercising. So you've got the top number on the whiteboard. You're actually exercising to bring back food to your family or to provide for somebody if it's not you for somebody. And I think that's, to me, the ultimate form of functional fitness. Right?

For sure. You're speaking my language, man. I mean, to me, that is the ultimate goal, is to be the ultimate provider. And I listened to the man show. Is that what it was that you had the guy on man show?

The art of Manliness.

The art of manliness.

Art of manliness, yeah. Brett McKay.

And the providing portion of that, I was like, spot on. Whether you're providing meat or growing a garden or in some way, shape or form, you are.

You are constantly providing for your community, whether it just be your family or your neighbors, whatever that might be. It is part of something that I take pride in. It's something that.

Do we have to hunt in order to survive? The answer is no. But there is something really pure about knowing exactly where that meat came from, how it was handled from the time it was killed to the time it was in your stomach.

The fact that you were able to do that and you were able to provide that for your family, it's just a different world we live in now than it was just 50 years ago or not even that long ago. Number one, there wasn't that many bow hunters because you only bow hunted if you couldn't afford a rifle. Number two, everything's really kinked. We get into this whole thing about America being lazy, and we're getting bigger and bigger because of convenience. And I think that at the heart of people, they really do, and maybe men specifically, they do want that adventure. They want to fulfill maybe what their ancestors were doing. I believe that technology is probably advancing faster than our DNA. We have this rub that goes on inside of us about we're fighting ourselves about wanting to provide and wanting to be out in nature and wanting to play that role. And yet there's a lot of things that happen in society and the community in the United States that are saying that may not be all right.

No, I mean, get out, get your hands dirty, you experience life. That's what you hear a lot of people say about obstacle racing. The first time, their back will cut up with barbed wire across the finish line, bleeding with their feet burned from jumping over the fire. It's like you think they'd be just bawling at the finish line, and it's the first time they've actually lived or the first time in a long time since they've been a kid that they've just gone out and just played and gotten scraped up. It's a very, very cool feeling that I think we'll see more and more people tapping into.

Absolutely.

I personally have gotten pretty good at being gassed and nailing a target from 30ft with the spear, so I may have to take the next step here and grab a bow. I'd love to see it and try out one of these competitions, so they sound pretty sick, so. Ken Claremont, trainhunt.com Yes. Ken, thanks for coming on the show, man.

You bet. Thank you. It's an honor. Thank you.

All right, folks, thanks for tuning in.